The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom finally puts the princess front and center, giving her the ability to conjure copies of anything from tables to tektites to help her on her journey. Despite the wealth of possibilities her summoned echoes present, some players had been worried that Echoes of Wisdom would feel like a step down from the infinite creativity unleashed by Tears of the Kingdom’s Zonai devices. Now that the game has been in players’ hands for a few days, some enterprising fans are putting those fears to bed, showing the wild range of expression afforded by Zelda’s newfound power.
It’s easy to get through Echoes of Wisdom only using a handful of particularly powerful echoes you earn early on. You can use beds to cross chasms from the beginning to the end of the game, and some of the most unassuming monsters out there make quick work of even the most fearsome foes. But as it turns out, the secret to success in Echoes of Wisdom isn’t just choosing your echoes wisely, but combining them in ways so bizarre even Nintendo probably didn’t count on them.
As surprisingly useful as beds are in Echoes of Wisdom, they’re even better when you use them for more than their intended purpose. As a low-cost summon with plenty of room to stand on, beds are already forming the backbone of some of the most impressive movement tricks in the game.
Just one day after Echoes of Wisdom’s launch, one player demonstrated how to turn the bed into Hyrule’s version of high-speed rail. The Pathblade enemy travels quickly in a straight line until it hits a wall, then slowly makes its way back. Get up high enough to stack a bed on top and jump on, and you can use this simple combo to cross any distance, as long as there’s nothing in the way.
If you’d rather take to the skies, you can still use a bed to do that by combining it with the Tornando, which blows away anything in its path, but the Crow might serve you better. With a Crow and a Tornando summoned, just hold onto the Crow, and let the Tornando push you as high or as far around the map as you want. Using that method, one player was able to get from the Jabul Waters area to halfway up nearby Hebra Mountain in about ten seconds.
Not to be outdone, the bed actually has some combat uses, too. X user yukino_san_14 has shared some of the most creative combat solutions, like stacking a bed on top of a Temper Tweelus, a small, angry rock monster covered in fire. Simply sleeping in the bed keeps Zelda out of harms’ way while the Tweelus goes to work demolishing a nearby Moblin.
An even more effective use of the Tweelus is to plant a Deku Baba on top. The Deku Baba is a sentient plant that gobbles up any nearby enemy, but it’s rooted to the ground. But with the Tweelus carrying the Deku Baba, it becomes an absolute beast, charging around the map on its rocky steed to find its next meal.
One final entry in the saga of yukino_san_14 stacking monsters on things lets you take out flying enemies with ease. Octoroks spit rocks at distant enemies, and yukino_san_14 summoned a few, plus their fire and ice variants on top of a large boulder. By just picking up the boulder with Bind, they have themselves a mobile artillery battery that makes quick work of flying foes.
It doesn’t take any advanced engineering to make creative use of your echoes in combat. The water block is typically used for traversal, by creating paths of water Zelda can swim through even in the air. But when one player encountered a Fire Wizzrobe, a tricky flying enemy that hurls fire and teleports, they summoned a tower of water blocks and just pulled the Wizzrobe into it with Bind. After a few seconds, the Fire Wizzrobe is extinguished without a fight.
So, sure, you can’t build your own flying robots in Echoes of Wisdom like you could in Link’s last adventure, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t inventive ways of tackling your problems. Next time you find yourself tempted to build yet another bed bridge, take a cue from some of Echoes of Wisdom’s echo innovators and see if you can’t find a combination that’s both more fun and more effective than using your summons the way they’re intended.
